Google Eyes The company everyone loves knows more about you than you might realize.
BY DAN KENNEDY
Is there a company anywhere within these United States with a better public image than Google has? We love it. We need it. We use it -- more than 200 million times a day, by some accounts. The unofficial slogan - "Don't Be Evil" - epitomizes everything we want in a business relationship. And more often than not, Google lives up to those words.
But there is another side to Google, and it's one that the company would just as soon you not think about. It's what happens each and every time you look up a piece of information. Maybe an old boyfriend. A political organization you heard mentioned on television the night before. A possible vacation spot. Perhaps you're a student trying to track down a terrorist group's web site for a paper you're writing. Or a church elder who likes to look at hard-core pornography. You might be seeking information on how to grow your own marijuana. Who knows?
Google knows. According to Lauren Weinstein, an internet activist and privacy expert based in southern California, Google keeps track of every search that's made, as well as the internet location of the computer from which the search is taking place -- and then it stores that information for possible future use. Moreover, he said, it would not be terribly difficult to trace those searches to the person who made them. That's you and me.